http://adamgriffiths.co.uk/Ghost v0.4.2Thu, 21 Mar 2019 20:01:26 GMT60It's now been two months since I (admittedly, hastily) announced my 12 books in 12 months challenge. I'll be honest, I had no idea that it had been two months since that blog post already. I have made a mental note that I posted it the same day I started at Siftware, so I know now.

I haven't launched my first book yet, let alone two of them. This post isn't going to be a whole bunch of reasons as to why I haven't done it yet; I have been terrible at keeping to my "free-time schedule" and will need to do things to fix that. Here's what will be happening from this moment onwards.

The Plan

The plan from now is to write as many books as I feel I can over the next 10 months. The first one lands within the next month, and is aimed at helping designers get to grips with git. There are plenty of git books out there, granted, but I feel I can explain git in a way that makes sense to less technically minded people.

After the launch of this book, I will be focussing on marketing it to hopefully make it a commercial success. I'm not looking to replce my income or sell thousands of copies, but I do want a return on the time I have put in to create the book and wouldn't mind a few extra pennies in my back pocket to boot.

I sincerely believe that Git for Designers can help a lot of people, and I would rather take 3 months to write the book (no mean feat in and of itself) and do it justice that rush to get a book out of the door in a month and half-ass it. I pulled the trigger a bit too soon on my crazy idea, so I'm toning it down a bit. Although I am still planning on writing multiple books this year still.

Future titles will stay technical, although I am tempted to write a quickstart guide to social media for small businesses, just to see where I could take something that wasn't completely technical in content.

Git for Designers

If you would like to be kept up to date with the progress and be notified when the book is available to purchase, pop your email in the box below. Don't worry, I hate spam too.

]]>http://adamgriffiths.co.uk/where-is-book-number-1/af462130-1777-4b9a-b358-b5cba3ea98f9Fri, 13 Mar 2015 20:01:04 GMTI am following Pieter Levels quest to build 12 startups in 12 months and it inspired me to create my own 12 in 12 challenge. I am going to write 12 technical books in 12 months. This sounds a little bit mental, but I believe it can be done. I have around 20 ideas for technical books and I know what price I can sell an ebook for, and having written a book before (almost 5 years ago now) I know the process and can replicate it for self-publishing ebooks.

I believe I can make a success from this, as it's much easier to sell somebody a one time $39 ebook than a monthly SaaS subscription.

I know what most people are thinking: "You're insane." And you're probably right, but this post helps give me a platform to launch the whole year of crazy-ness and allows me to have all my books listed in one place.

The books

The books aren't likely to be full 300 page ebooks, nor should they. I would much rather pay for an ebook and have 100 pages of good content, than 300 pages that the author clearly puffed out with fluff and bullshit.

EU VAT Regulations

From 1st January 2015, all business selling digital goods to customers in the EU need to charge that customer VAT based on where they are situated, not where the business is situated. This would be a huge burden for me and actually put me off doing this sooner. I have found a service that will take care of all the VAT reporting and payments for me, PayHip – they charge a flat 5% fee plus PayPal costs. This means roughly a 10% cost of selling through them, which is a whole lot better than registering for VAT and building my own system to sell the books through.

What will the books cost

I am going to be aiming to sell these books at $39, this is pretty much what most other quality technical books are selling for and I know I can write well. I wrote my first book 5 years ago and spent 9 months writing technical documentation for Zengenti.

Now I have taken a web developer position at Siftware I will be exposed daily to new technologies and will have to learn things fast. Giving me the tools I need to be able to pull this feat off.

What if I fail?

I suppose the definition of fail in this instance will be that I don't publish 12 books in 12 months. What if I wrote 6? That's still damn good and should provide me with a good little side income, if all goes well.

How will I market the books?

I will following in the footsteps of many other people by having a newsletter people can sign up to to hear when the book is ready. I will also be writing blog posts with content from the books periodically to get people interested in the books themselves. I also have small sales targets, I am not looking to replace my income and am doing this as a way to make a little extra money, so I can boost my savings and maybe even upgrade my car.

Writing 12 books in 12 months is a batshit insane idea, but marketing them and trying to get people to buy they as well is even more mental than that. But, I am confident I can deliver, and if I don't, I'm still going to have something to show for it at the end.

How am I going to do this, really?

I am reading Amy Hoy's Just Fucking Ship – so far it's a cracking book and will help me plan out the reverse timeline of each book and is helping me map out the exact process of each book. Also writing one book per month should be good practice and it will get quicker and simpler as the year moves on.

]]>http://adamgriffiths.co.uk/12-books-12-months/2e119f74-a692-4948-b9f7-a29b50d2ba9cTue, 13 Jan 2015 20:27:21 GMTI've noticed a number of people putting out yearly reviews and thought I would do the same myself, this year has been a big one for me and going forward into 2015 I have made some changes.

A steady start

I started the year as a freelance web developer, a role I had carried out for 3 years full-time and had some pretty nice income with. I started the year off with some runway to build my own product (which inevitably tanked, but it was a good experience). I also carried out some PHP development work for Siftware, a small development studio run by Darren Beale who I know through Shropgeek.

Working with a team

I ultimately missed working in a team and so I accepted a job with Zengenti working as a Technical Writer and their Community Manager. I helped them rewrite all of their technical documentation for their Content Management System, Contensis, as well as pulling their community together and speaking at 4 of their client events throughout the year.

I really enjoyed being a part of their team, I worked on some good projects and enjoyed spending all of my time doing something different to development work. Unfortunately I no longer work at Zengenti, but I'll get to that shortly.

Thailand

I am currently stationed in Thailand, I have been here for 3.5 weeks and have just over a week left here before heading home to my new job. I came here for my Dads birthday and am staying here for new year and to relax a bit before jumping back into development work!

2015

It is with great pleasure I can "officially" announce that I accepted a job to work with Darren over at Siftware, and will be spending my time in their office in Shrewsbury working on PHP projects again!! I am really excited as I now get to work in Shrewsbury in my preferred job role, and am looking forward to the challenges the new role will undoubtedly provide me.

This years goals

I'm going to keep this short and sweet, with bullet points.

Write a book on Laravel development, in the same vein as my first book, CodeIgniter 1.7 Professional Development This means dealing with VAT but I want to do something on the side that will actually make me some extra pennies

Apply to become a Special Constable with West Mercia Police. This is something I applied to do last year but was unable to due to an inane reason to do with someone else's criminal record (I've never even had a parking ticket) so this year I will apply again as my circumstances have changed.

Failing that my intention would be to obtain my SIA Door Supervisors license so I can progress higher up in my role as a Steward at Shrewsbury Town Football club.

Save 40% of my take home pay. When freelancing I saved up a buffer, I did this whilst at Zengenti also but I am now spending it in Thailand, ensuring I save 40% means I live well below my means and will be able to buy myself nice things!

Pick up French and German again. I took both languages at GCSE in school and have been able to hold conversations in both languages on my Thailand holiday but am nowhere near the ability I used to be, so I intend to pick up both languages again. I might even take two short trips to France and/or Germany and challenge myself not to use any English at all.

So, there you have it, my short and sweet year in review for 2014. It's been about 2 years since I did my last year in review and it will be my intention to keep doing these for as long as possible.

]]>http://adamgriffiths.co.uk/2014-year-in-review/86069fc0-cb94-4111-b029-a92c442ab55bWed, 31 Dec 2014 10:35:51 GMTJust under two weeks ago I posted my challenge to start a business in 20 days and a call for as many people to see it as possible. This was so that I had some accountability in the matter and would actually launch the damn thing! I didn't make it easy on myself though.

I picked a busy time to start

I managed to pick a very busy time of year to start this challenge. Some of you will know I steward for Shrewsbury Town Football Club and in the past week we've had 3 home games. This has put me out of action for the previous two Tuesday nights as well as two Saturday afternoons (1pm - 5pm). This means my time has been reduced as along with my other commitments, kickboxing twice weekly, darts on a Monday and I joined a gym and made a commitment to myself that I would go (I'll write about this soon), has meant the time I have been able to spend on the new site has been reduced down to just a few waking hours a week with a Sunday thrown in the mix.

I've had to re-rethink the product (slightly)

To get around this I've taken what I already has built during the previous 7 months (which probably amounts to a weeks worth of work and effort) and jig it to fit the new direction of the product. This means rather than adding websites, you add your servers instead. This has meant I've had to undo some code and redo other parts to properly reflect the new approach.

Am I on track to meet my target?

Well, no. Not at the moment anyway. There's no doubt about it, I have found it difficult to move my schedule to make time for building and marketing the product. This next week will be a bigger test than I could have imagined, I have more or less a week (although I want to launch by the 23rd, as I'm on holiday from the 24th) to finish the build of the product and launch it. I have a bunch of new server monitoring tools to build and roll out across 5 datacentres (although I will select which datacentres to prioritise, based on where people sign up from so I can keep costs to a minimum at the beginning.

Keep up to date

If you'd like to stay informed on if I do manage to launch or not, you can sign up for updates below. Likewise if you're interested in the server monitoring service I'll be providing (even with the minimal information I've put out so far) then pop your email in the box below and I'll let you all know when I do launch.

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]]>http://adamgriffiths.co.uk/one-week-to-go-the-final-stretch/b071d293-cb2c-4448-88e9-7a5ec85fd70bTue, 19 Aug 2014 08:26:39 GMTMany of you reading this will know of my 7 month adventure to (so far) fail to launch my web hosting business, hostingandsupport.co. Now I only found out that I registered the domain 7 months ago yesterday whilst writing this blog post. This is the final nail in the coffin for hostingandsupport.co and this begins the rebirth of a new endeavour.

Scrapping Hosting

My last blog post explained how I was willing to personally onboard every new hosting client I would sign up. I was always going to do this but for some this may still be a barrier to entry. Therefore I am going to solely focus on the support side of the offering.

Motivation

Amy Hoy just today has put out the following blog post and 'podcast' where Pat Maddox built a business in 10 days and got $3k monthly recurring revenue in the process. My sights aren't that high as I have a full-time position, but I still feel that if I haven't launched by the 25th of August 2014 I will have failed pretty spectacularly.

I have also been motivated by the post I’m Launching 12 Startups in 12 Months so I am attempting to do this as quickly as possible to get a product out there, then I can refine it quickly as requests come in from paying clients.

There are countless examples of people out there finding out what people will pay for and launching to a small audience they gained through hard work and offering something for free (a short ebook, for example) to gain recognition and enough trust between themselves and prospective customers that they can launch to a group of people just itching to pay them for their service.

Sales Safari

Amy runs a bootcamp called 30x500 now I haven't taken this course, I don't have the available funds to but I have taken on board much of the free advice that she has nicely made available. 30x500 has a process called a sales safari which as far as I can tell involves talking to business owners and finding out where they have issues and then selling them a service that they already told you they would pay for.

I have done this in the very fact of having the website out there over many iterations and talking to people at shropgeek about the types of hosting monitoring service they need.

I believe, based on the feedback from others as well as what people are saying on forums and such that the product I will put out in 20 days time will have customers in its first week.

Be notified

This post serves two purposes. Firstly, it opens me up to actually deliver on the 25th (or before), it requires me to pull my finger out and get into the habit of consistently working on something until it is done in a timely manner.

Secondly, it allows me to ask anyone who needs or thinks they need or would like a server administrator but can't afford one to sign up below to be notified when I launch. I won't spam you and will only ever contact you regarding this product.

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]]>http://adamgriffiths.co.uk/launching-a-business-in-20-days-or-bust/07d32434-9afe-453a-abeb-0b2852a9dbffWed, 06 Aug 2014 20:25:50 GMTAnd what I intend to do about it.

I'm starting a business to fix nearly all the issues web designers find when running their own hosting environment for their clients. Below is a run down of the current options to you, what I feel is wrong with them all and why I believe my offer to you is more beneficial.

Your current options

When choosing to provide your clients with web hosting, these are you current options.

Reseller Hosting

This is the option I started with when I was 14 when I had a few clients locally paying me for their hosting. If you are running a business, and part of that is providing a web hosting service, you really shouldn't be using a reseller account, here's why.

Resellers are massively oversold

The only way certain companies which shall not be named can provide you with unlimited hosting for £29.99 a month is because they expect you to only use a tiny amount of space on their servers. There isn't an unlimited amount of space on the whole internet never mind giving an unlimited amount to every customer. The wording they might mean is unmetered, which means they don't bother looking. But even then if you're the most prolific user they will tell you to stop using so much of their resources or try to move you onto a dedicated package that provides a set limit for a higher fee each month.

Don't forget the hidden costs

When resources are oversold, you are given a certain amount of space under the understanding that you only use a lot less than that. This means that somewhere in the terms and conditions will be hidden costs or some kind of penalty for using the resources you think you are buying. This is shady marketing and I don't like it. That's why my hosting service has set limits determined by the size of the VPS you buy. Put as many sites on there as will fit, because there are definitely space limits on the hard drives.

Unmanaged VPS / Dedicated Server

An unmanaged VPS can be the cheapest and most desirable option as many freelancers see this is a way to flip a $10 server by selling space to all of their clients on the hope that the server never goes down. This also includes an unmanaged dedicated server.

You don't know how to manage a server

It's just not good enough to follow a guide to set up a server, or several isolated guides for that matter. Servers need to be setup by somebody with knowledge of servers and who has managed them for years (me!)

You don't need another hat

You're a freelancer, so you're already wearing all of the hats required to run a business, you don't need another. Managing a server isn't simply a case of setting it up and letting it run forever. It needs tweaking for performance, updates need to be run and when everything goes tits up, a reboot and a fix at 3am.

You really don't want to be woken up at 3am

Picture it. You have a meeting at 9am with a potential new client when you get woken up at 3am with text messages that your server is down. Naturally you followed a guide to set the server up so aren't completely sure what to do when it goes down. So you just manage to get the server up before heading out to your 9am meeting. You blow the meeting and worst of all, your server goes down again because whatever issue brought it down is still there and now it will recur. A pretty dreary day in the office if you ask me.

Managed VPS / Dedicated Server

Now the best option is a managed VPS, which is close to what I am going to provide (more later) but there are still issues with managed hosting.

Overpriced

Far too often I see pricing for managed services running into hundreds of pounds just for somebody to manage the smallest of servers. In these cases I believe the only time somebody will work on your server is when it goes down, or when you specifically ask for some work to be carried out on the server. There won't be proactive updates or even performance tweaks.

Hello, I'm David, I'll help you with this ticket

David might be helping you this time around, but next time you probably won't get David again, certainly not the same David who knows your business and knows which clients have the most needs. Ideally you need somebody who knows your business, knows what you need and knows the circumstances of your hosting. Ideally this person would know the percentage of revenue that hosting brings in for your business so they can react properly and in a timely manner. David only knows what you put in the ticket, and not a whole lot more.

My proposal

Now I know that I am tooting my own horn here, but take a look at the likes of Heart Internet and Rackspace and you'll see that I haven't just made all of this up. Here's what I will offer you if you move your hosting over to my managed service.

Personalised service

Let's face it, I could provide the best service in the world and you still won't spend time migrating all of your client sites over to my environment, it's a pain moving web hosts. So I'll migrate your client sites for you seamlessly so you can enjoy the benefits described below.

My business is ensuring your business runs smoothly. Part of your business will be recurring hosting revenue, and I need to do my job to help you keep hold of that revenue each month. I will take a vested interest in you and your business and I will ensure the only person you need to speak to regarding your hosting will be me. So you don't have to speak to multiple people in the same support ticket like larger companies.

No hidden fees

The package you choose has a monthly fee and that is the price you will pay each money. Go over on your bandwidth? I'll let you know when you get close, but I won't add it to your bill. Not only does this mean it's easier to budget your expenses but it's also more convenient to know up front how much you will be paying each month.

Proactive updates & performance enhancements

I won't be having thousands of customers, and even if I did I will be in a position to hire more server administrators to be able to focus on a limited number of clients to ensure a personalised service. This means we will be able to carry out proactive updates so rather than you asking us to upgrade your server, or worst the server not being upgraded we will do it automatically. We will also carry out regular performance enhancements, anywhere we can see we can benefit you and your clients we will.

But what about my full-time job?

I realise I have written on this blog about my full-time writing role at Zengenti. That won't stop me from carrying out this work for you any other time of the day. Here's why you don't need me full-time (yet). Zengenti are aware of my hosting offering and knew about this before they hired me.

I'll be setting your server up from scratch to be almost bullet-proof with a secure firewall and HTTP brute force protection. If someone decides to DDOS your server, it will stay up, but might be a little slow.

I'm writing software to carry out much of the tasks I would do anyway. Like in the case of a brute force attack, I can compile a list of the perpetrating IP address' and block them from accessing the site. This can all happen in near real-time, reducing the need for me to always be available.

If the server goes down for any reason, my monitoring service will reboot the server automatically and send me an urgent text message with details. I will then be able to login to the server to diagnose the issue and perform a fix. If this is an issue that occurs on all other servers I manage I'll be able to roll a fix out to all other clients so it won't affect them. Of course this means that any time an issue occurs on any of my client servers then all other servers will be patched against it.

Of course there will also be regular server updates to the software running.

The latest version of PHP, Apache and MySQL will be used. Let me know what extensions you might need extra and I'll do this upon set up.

I will also help change your clients nameservers so they point to your new server with me. I really want this to be as painless as possible for you to move your service over. After all you have a business to run! :)

If this is of interest to you, head on over to hostingandsupport.co and pop your email address in the form. The price listed there isn't the price I'm launching with. Price will start from £99 a month for a server with 2GG RAM, 40GB SSD and 3TB of bandwidth. Or you can send me an email at adam@hostingandsupport.co and let me know you're interested. I'll be ready to launch in a few weeks.

]]>http://adamgriffiths.co.uk/web-hosting/55e696e3-f8b0-44a4-8287-e2d03dee3094Thu, 17 Jul 2014 13:18:13 GMTFor those of who who have read my first blog post you might have some questions regarding my decision to move away from development in a freelance capacity and start writing full time.

I'm (probably) good at it

Having been hired for my ability to write, and from feedback inside of work on the quality of articles I have been writing on ZenHub as well as feedback on the new posts on this website, it would appear that people like my writing, which means I must be fairly good at it.

I've wanted to blog regularly for too long

I have hosted a blog on this domain for 5 years now and I have never been able to write consistently, or on a relatively small set of topics. Now I have been writing at work for 4 months, I have got into the routine of writing. I also have built up a pretty hefty list of post ideas, so much so in fact that I'm going to be writing once a week instead of on a bi-weekly schedule.

Writing has quicker benefits

I can sit down for half an hour and write a blog post, I cannot sit down for half an hour and have a working application on my screen. I like the fact I could set aside 30 minutes each night and have 7 posts written a week. I also find it easier to drive traffic (even though it is a small amount at the moment) and I enjoy seeing users come to a post and watch them come and go in real time.

It's a different challenege

Building a blog with an audience is hard. I've taken the first step to building an audience by sticking to writing about writing (meta!), launching a side project and writing a book amongst some personal posts.

Getting traffic is a different beast altogether though. I'm currently using a mixture of buffer and general tweets to try and build an audience for the blog. Things are moving slowly and I will have to learn 'marketing' if I want to expand my reach and readership past 6 clicks every time I tweet a link to a new post.

On that note, if you enjoy my writing and want to keep up to date with my journey building a product business (my new book & hostingandsupport.co) then please pop your email into the box below and I'll make sure to email you each time I publish a post (max once per week) and some newsletter-only content from my book.

Or the story of how I went from globe-trotting freelance web developer to in-house technical writer. On purpose!

Before I took on my current role at Zengenti, I had spent 1 in 6 months in Asia, mostly Thailand. Or to put it into perspective, about twice as much holiday as I'm allowed to take now. How does someone make this change and most importantly, why? Well we need to take a look at all the writing I've done alongside development work, to see how long I've been building up to switching to writing without actually knowing it.

Programmers Voice

If you know what Programmers Voice was, congratulations! You've probably been following me around the web for over 5 years. For those of you none the wiser, Programmers Voice was my first foray into writing educational content. It was a programming tutorial blog akin to Nettuts+ with all content written by myself, no guest authors! Topics covered the CodeIgniter PHP Framework, jQuery, Writing your own PHP Framework and more. This was the stepping stone that got me a contract with Packt Publishing to write my first book CodeIgniter 1.7 Professional Development and I've just started to stop getting royalty checks, not bad for work I did 4 years ago.

CodeIgniter 1.7 Professional Development

My very first book, and more than likely my last as well. From now on I will be self-publishing my content and more than likely I'll be packaging everything up as a course rather than an ebook. But that's a topic for another day. My experience publishing a book with a traditional publisher could have been better, but let's face it, I was 17 and got paid a fair chunk of change to write it.

CodeIgniter Libraries User Guide

I wrote a handful of CodeIgniter libraries that I open sourced, most notably AG Auth which is still available but no longer supported. I knew I had to write quality documentation for the libraries, due to CodeIgniter having an impeccable user guide. I think this is something that turned me on to the importance of writing good documentation and is more than likely a big reason as to why AG Auth has been used by so many developers (the number is in the thousands).

My work at Zengenti

Which brings me nicely on to my role at Zengenti. I am writing the documentation for their software, and they know the importance of good documentation and are committed to having quality documentation for all their features, modules and plugins.

The secret to changing careers? Have absolutely no idea what you're doing. All of these steps have built up to the next one, and every time I moved on a step I gained more experience and more reach to people. I am hoping that I can do this again with this new style blog. I hope that by writing about what I have done, what I am doing and what I want to do I can help others get to where they want to be.

If you want to stay up to date with my posts, please sign up to my bi-weekly (maybe weekly) newsletter.

]]>http://adamgriffiths.co.uk/how-to-successfully-change-careers/d4befae2-167b-4e7b-9e85-645a0d059b7aThu, 03 Jul 2014 17:41:42 GMTI've written briefly about the fact I am writing my next book. The topic of which will be server management aimed at freelancers whose core business offering is not managing servers, but those that need this skill to enhance their business. The book will be perfect for freelance designers, all the way up to server admins already working in the industry.

I will be self publishing and the title above is a working title, although the content won't change. If you want to know when the book is available already, please sign up for my newsletter at the bottom of this post.

The ebook will be presented in two formats: a standard PDF ebook; and an email course more akin to a college course, with actionable tasks to complete to help each section stick. Although you will still be able to come back to the book as and when you need to.

The (mostly) complete Table of Contents

Setting up a new server

Securing your server

Installing the LAMP stack

Configuring Virtual Hosts

Installing SSL Certificates

Logging & Errors

Common Issues

Upgrading Software

Using Control Panels

BONUS CHAPTER: Initial setup with Vagrant

BONUS CHAPTER: Using git for running deployments

If you see anything that should be in this list, don't hesitate to email me adam@adamgriffiths.co.uk with your suggestions. After all, if there is something you want me to teach you then I need to know! :)

I wanted to write a book to span across as many people as possible, to help them enhance their skill set. Maybe you want to extend your offering to clients. Maybe you just want to know how to set up a server for a client properly, with actionable steps to follow. Or maybe you're looking into switching careers and would like to know some of the basics first. Whatever your story, I wanted to write a book that would suit your needs.

If you want to find out when the book and course will be available, then all I ask for is to sign up to my newsletter. I send out an email bi-weekly (sometimes weekly) on a Thursday. I'll only ever send you content relating to this blog and the book and I won't sell your email to anyone.

Thanks.

]]>http://adamgriffiths.co.uk/my-new-book-proper-server-management-for-freelancers/3c35d30c-ecdb-41a2-b2e5-ffeed07a21cdWed, 25 Jun 2014 19:49:25 GMTI now work full time for a Zengenti as a Technical Writer. I thought I would reduce my website down to a simple Ghost blog and start writing for myself again as well.

Ghost?

I've wanted to play around with some new technologies for a while now, and Ghost looks like a great simple blogging system and is perfect for my needs. I'm not the best designer and if I am taking my career down the technical writing route then I don't want anything to get in the way of my words. (Keep it Simple Stupid)

New career?

Whilst I'm not stepping away from development totally, I will find it difficult to commit myself to any development projects whilst holding down a full time job. Being out of the house for roughly 11 hours every day really kicks me out of it when I get home and it is difficult to do anything more than write. So I will just do that.

My role at Zengenti

Zengenti is a software vendor and web design and hosting company based in Ludlow, about an hour from my home town of Shrewsbury. They're by far the biggest web shop in Shropshire and I couldn't ask for a better employer. They saw my book and wanted the same kind of quality writing for the documentation for their CMS, Contensis. You can see the work I have done there by going to look at ZenHub which will eventually be their new support site, but for now is a knowledge base for all their usage documentation.

My official title is Technical Writer and Community Manager which means I have two roles.

Writing & updating techncial documentation

Managing community expectations and being the link between Zengenti and their users

It's a difficult line to straddle but it is a challenege I relish as one week I can spend all my time deep in documentation and the next I am replying to client requests and helping people to use the software better and make them look great in front of their boss.

Whats coming?

I have decided I am going to write another book. Now my full time job is being spent as a writer, I must have a knack for it, right? I wrote my first book when I was 17 and a lot has happened since then, I have grown up and had experiences and my writing has changed considerably.

I feel I know a lot more about a whole host of other topics and may write more than one new book. The only thing that isn't totally settled right now is what the topic of my book will be. I will be conducting some validation on a few ideas I have and see which one takes off (if any) do; as after all, if nobody wants to buy my book then there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of point in writing it.

Final

I will keep this blog as a personal one but will also be writing about technical subjects mostly related to my next book and to feed some examples of the book out to people. I plan to go away this Christmas to recharge and have some down time, but I hope to have finished my next book by then and be able to show something for my efforts.